In the previous post, I suggested that it is helpful to think of peer mentoring as a set of tools that can be used in different ways in different college contexts to promote student success and degree completion. Three ways peer mentoring can be used to facilitate college student success were discussed: increasing mentee engagement and involvement in learning, building campus connections, and providing mentees with emotional support and validation. This post continues that discussion.

• Peer mentoring can Help Mentees Navigate Your College, locate important resources and use them appropriately.

Peer mentoring can increase mentees’ chances of success by helping locate and use important resources (Collier, 2015, pp. 70-72). The sheer geographical size of a university can make even taken for- granted aspects of student life, such as getting from one class to another when they are not in the same building, unexpected sources of stress. Peer mentors can help new students deal with geographical navigation issues by providing them with campus maps and walking them around the campus to identify important campus resources.

Peer mentors need to do more than just provide their mentees with information about campus resources. They should explain to mentees how specific campus resources are associated with specific student issues. In addition, mentors should share personal strategies for how to effectively use different resources in ways that improve the likelihood of college success. The mentor presents information to the mentee in the form of a script that facilitates storage and recall from memory by connecting a student adjustment issue, such as writing a research paper, with a specific campus resource, such as the library, and a strategy for using that resource to address the issue, such as instructing the mentee to use the website to access tutorials on putting together a research paper.

Increasing mentees’ relative levels of role mastery involves mentors helping new students figure out how to proceed in key interactions with university personnel, which is necessary for college success (Collier, 2015). Through role modeling, peer mentors provide mentees with a set of scripts that improve the students’ chances of enacting key components of the university student role successfully in interactions with others. Examples of student success scripts include how to communicate with professors, how to act on the first day of class, how to make the most out of a meeting with an adviser, or how to get financial aid questions answered. The underlying idea is that when students follow these proven scripts for taking on the college student role, they will have a better than average chance of success at the university because these scripts have been shown to work in the past.

• Peer mentoring can improve mentee decision making

One important way that peer mentoring can help transitioning students succeed at college is by helping them make better decisions (Collier, 2015, pp. 72-77).

Through role modeling, peer mentoring leads to higher quality decision making and ultimately college student success. Peer mentors can help mentees achieve positive college outcomes by sharing their college student expertise and providing mentees with insights into the university’s expectations for successful students. Role modeling is the key. It is not enough that a mentor models the college student role, the mentor must also explain to the mentee why the mentor has chosen the alternative problem solving strategy. The mentor not only shares practical knowledge, he or she also provides the mentee with backstage information on how the culture of higher education works.

For the mentee, accepting the mentor’s advice is highly likely to result in a superior outcome. Instead of the mentee using his or her limited experience to try to figure out which alternative strategy will produce the best outcomes based on trial and error, the decision is now based on a much simpler process: “Should I accept this strategy as the best one to use because the mentor recommends it?” It is the peer mentor’s experience with already dealing with this issue that encourages the mentee to follow the advice that is offered. When the mentor shares his or her expertise in the form of strategies that work, one consequence is higher quality decision making by the mentee.

In the last two posts, I’ve described peer mentoring as the “Swiss Army knife” of college student support resources. I identified six potential ways that peer mentoring could be used to promote college student success. There undoubtedly could be more. Typically, the needs of the group of students being served will determine which of these different ways that peer mentoring can promote student success will be incorporated into a single program.

The next post explores why, in some situations, peer mentoring may be more effective than hierarchical mentoring in promoting college student success.

There is a paradox associated with college student peer mentoring programs

On the one hand, colleges and universities have increasingly turned to peer mentoring programs as part of their efforts to facilitate student success and retention. On the other hand, in many instances programs may lack clear, explicit explanations of how peer mentoring is supposed to bring about the range of positive effects its champions claim it can deliver. Sometimes overly enthusiastic peer mentoring advocates makes claims they cannot deliver.

Peer mentoring is not a magic bullet for solving any and all problems students face as they make transitions in higher education. To be clear, there is no direct causal relationship between students’ participating in a peer mentoring program and mastering specific content material or completing a particular degree program. What peer mentoring can do is directly affect key intervening variables that have been associated with a greater likelihood of college student success and persistence.

It is helpful to think of Peer mentoring as a set of tools for promoting college student success and retention. Different tools in the set can be used in different ways to accomplish different goals. Here are some examples.

Astin’s student involvement model proposes that the extent to which a student is engaged and involved in the actual process of his or her education is an excellent predictor of academic success and degree completion. For Astin, involvement refers to “the amount of physical and psychological energy the student puts into his or her academic experiences” (p. 297). Academic experiences can be very general, such as involvement in campus activities, or very specific, such as studying for a specific examination.

Astin also establishes that peer groups can have an impact on the level of student involvement in the learning process; students whose friends are engaged in campus activities are more likely to become involved themselves.. Peer mentoring programs can help students get involved in their educations by connecting them to opportunities to take part in campus activities. Mentors’ modeling of the college student role is a particularly effective tool for helping mentees understand the benefits of being an engaged learner.. It is not so much the specific activities modeled by peer mentors that are important as that these modeled activities encourage student mentees to more actively participate in their own educations. Peer mentoring promotes increases mentee involvement in learning through mentors demonstrating the positive effects of involvement.

Tinto proposes that background characteristics, feelings of connection, and the degree of fit between the student and the institutional environment determine whether a student will drop out of college or persist until graduation. In this model an individual arrives at college with a package of assets including individual attributes, such as intelligence or creativity; pre-college schooling experiences, such as the availability of advanced placement courses in high school; and family background characteristics, such as parents’ educational or income levels. These assets have an impact on two kinds of connection that in turn have an impact on students’ persistence at college. Academic connection refers to students’ desire to complete a college degree, while social connection, which refers to students’ desire to get a degree at a particular institution. In Tinto’s model, academic and social connection are important predictors of whether students decide to persist or drop out of college. With all other factors held constant, the more a student feels academically connected at school, the more that student will be committed to completing a college degree. Similarly, the more socially connected students feel, the more they will commit to completing degrees at their respective colleges.

Peer mentoring impacts student success, in this model, by facilitating mentees’ social connections to their respective colleges and universities. First, peer mentors can make mentees aware of different opportunities to participate in campus activities. In addition, through role modeling and participating in these activities themselves, mentors can help mentees better understand the college culture and the value of active getting involved in campus life. Increased levels of social connection, facilitated by peer mentoring, then is associated with increased chances of mentees completing their college degrees,

Peer mentoring can provide mentees with emotional support and validation.

As noted in an earlier post, mentees consistently report how important their mentors’ emotional support is to them. First-generation and under-represented students who may question whether they really belong in college particularly value this kind of support (Ishiyama, 2007, p. 457).

Mentor support increases mentee success by validating them as legitimate college students. It works like this. As students make transitions in higher education (e.g. high school to college, 2 year to four year), they figure out how well they are enacting the college student role through social feedback. The most effective feedback comes from others who understand and are using the same version of the role the student is using (Collier, 2001). The fact that peer mentors are successful students at the same school the mentees are attending lends weight to the mentors’ feedback. So when the mentor validates a mentee’s effort by acknowledging that the mentee is a legitimate college student, the mentee is more likely to believe that feedback.

The next post will focus on three more important ways that peer mentoring can impact other key variables that directly promote mentee success:

Next: Peer Mentoring is a set of Tools; How You Use them makes a difference part 2

What is Mentoring? What is Peer Mentoring? What are the Positive Effects of Peer Mentoring on College Student Success?

Welcome back. I hope 2016 will be a good year for all of us. In this post I will share some essential background information on mentoring and the impact of mentoring on college students. In an effort not to bog you down with log lists of citations, I have chosen to provide a single example to support different specific claims. For more elaborate lists of examples, please see any of the project final reports on the “Approach” page of my website. For an even more current and exhaustive list of citations, please see my 2015 book: Developing Effective Student Peer Mentoring Programs: A Practioner’s Guide to Program Design, Delivery, Evaluation and Training. Sterling, VA: Stylus Press.

The concept of mentoring goes back to the ancient Greeks. In Homer’s Odyssey, when Ulysses embarks on his journey to Troy, he leaves his son in the care of a trusted teacher, Mentor, with instructions to watch over the boy and raise him as he would his own child.

Definition of mentoring

Mentoring seems to mean different things to different groups of people. Although there is no universal agreement on a single definition of mentoring in higher education, Donaldson, Ensher and Grant-Vallone define “mentoring” as occurring when a senior person or mentor provides information, advice, and emotional support to a junior person or student over a period of time.

Models of college student mentoring are based on Kram’s original work from a business context. She proposes that mentoring relationships serve two primary functions: career development and psychosocial support. For college students, career development can be thought of as academic support and includes mentors promoting academic success and facilitating mentees’ efforts to complete their degrees. Psychosocial support, on the other hand, focuses on helping students adjust to the new college environment and legitimating them as “real” college students.

Within higher education, mentoring is increasingly associated with efforts to promote student success, which includes helping students stay in school and complete their degrees in a timely manner. Peer mentoring programs are particularly popular. Sixty-five percent of the public four-year colleges and universities included in American College Testing’s “What Works in Student Retention” survey reported having peer mentoring programs with goals of promoting student success and retention.

Differences Between Informal and Formal College Student Mentoring Relationships

In a college context, formal student mentoring refers to structured and intentional relationships where mentors and student mentees are matched by a third party, such as mentoring program staff. Informal student mentoring, on the other hand, refers to naturally occurring supportive relationships students have with older and more experienced individuals such as advisers, professors, or other students. Many times informal mentors actually provide the initial push and encouragement that lead college students to get involved in formal mentoring programs.

Differences Between Hierarchical and Peer Mentoring for College Students

Hierarchical mentoring for college students involves individuals from two different social positions, such as faculty–student, adviser–student, or counselor–student. This is similar to a mentoring relationship in a business context where a senior manager mentors a junior staff person. Peer mentoring describes a relationship where a more experienced student helps a less experienced student improve overall academic performance and provides advice, support, and knowledge to the mentee. Unlike hierarchical mentoring, peer mentoring matches mentors and mentees who are roughly equal in age and power. Although a peer mentor may or may not be older than the mentee, there is a considerable difference in each one’s level of college experience.

While I am an advocate of peer mentoring, I want to emphasize that BOTH hierarchical and peer mentoring are effective in promoting student success and helping students deal with a range of college adjustment issues. In a subsequent posting I will explore why I think peer mentoring may be more effective for working with these students, but for now one big take away is “when it comes to promoting college success, both types of mentoring work.” In this blog, I will focus on peer mentoring.

What Do We Know About the Impacts of Peer Mentoring on College Students?

Peer mentoring increases the chances of degree completion. College students who participate in peer mentoring programs report stronger intentions to stay in college and complete their degrees (e.g. Sanchez, Bauer, & Paronto, 2006). The theory of reasoned action from psychology argues that individuals’ stated intentions are the best predictors of their subsequent actions (e.g. Ajzen & Fishbein, 1970). Therefore peer mentoring programs, by positively affecting mentees’ intentions to stay in school and graduate, actually contribute to increasing these students’ chances of graduating.

Peer mentoring affirms mentees’ beliefs they can succeed as college students. Students making the transition from high school, community college, or another educational system to a university must learn a new role or a new version of the role of college student. Several studies found that students who participated in peer mentoring programs demonstrated increased levels of confidence in this new role (Smith-Jentsch et al., 2008 ).

Peer mentoring provides mentees with safe allies for sharing personal and college concerns. New students making the transition to college face an unfamiliar and complex environment. They must deal with a range of new issues and struggle to find other people they can confide in. Several studies found that mentees viewed peer mentors as allies with whom it was safe to disclose personal issues and information. Mentees also reported that they viewed peer mentors as approachable sources of expert knowledge about college because of their academic achievements (e.g. Schmidt, Marks, & Derrico, 2004 ). Mentors had already succeeded in the very same college context that mentees aspired to succeed in themselves.

Peer mentoring is particularly effective at promoting college success for students of color and other underrepresented student groups. Many colleges and universities use peer mentoring to facilitate unrepresented student groups’ college transitions (e.g. Jackson, Smith, & Hill, 2003). Peer mentors serve as role models and provide encouragement and support for these students who must deal with the range of college adjustment issues all new students face while struggling to adjust to a context where their home culture is no longer dominant. Participating in peer mentoring programs has been shown to be associated with improved retention and academic performance for several groups of students of color including Latino/Latina (e.g. Thile & Matt, 1995 ), African American (e.g. Good, Haplin, & Haplin, 2000 ), Native American (e.g. Shotton, Oosahwe, & Cintron, 2007 ), and Asian American students (e.g. Kim,Goto, Bai, Kim, & Wong, 2001 ).

In this post I have defined mentoring, distinguished between peer- and hierarchical mentoring as well as between informal and formal mentoring programs. I have also identified several possible positive outcomes for college students who participate peer mentoring programs. But mentoring is not a magic pill. Students in some mentoring programs may “feel good” about their time in their programs without necessarily experiencing an accompanying improvement in academic outcomes. In the next posting I will explain why every college student mentoring program does not produce the same positive outcomes.

Next: Peer Mentoring is a Set of Tools; How You Use them makes a Differencepart 1

College degree non-completion is a critically important issue; currently more than 40% of students who begin college fail to finish their degrees. Non-completion rates vary by type of college. Among first-time, full-time undergraduate students who began seeking a bachelor’s degree at a 4-year degree-granting institution in fall 2007, the 6-year graduation rate was 58 percent at public institutions, 65 percent at private nonprofit institutions, and 32 percent at private for-profit institutions. Non-completion rates also vary according to institutions’ level of selectivity. The more selective the school (i.e. ones with the lowest admissions acceptance rates), the higher it’s 6 year graduation rate.

Students who begin college but leave without completing their degrees represent lost opportunities on national, institutional and personal levels.

National level Costs

On the national level, an educated workforce is critical for competing in the world economic system, yet the U.S. currently ranks 16th out of 26 developed countries in terms of the percentage of 25 to 34 year old college graduates. As recently as 2003, U.S. ranked second (to Norway) out of 30 industrialized democracies in % of 25 to 35 year olds with at least a Bachelor’s degree (Mortenson, 2012).

Since the federal government and 41 state governments rely on income taxes to fund government services, students who do not complete their degrees represent a major loss of tax revenue (Moreno, 2014).

Students who do not complete their degrees are more likely to require government-funded public support services. They are also more likely to incur costs for federal, state, and local governments. Students who do not complete their degrees are less likely to be civically engaged in their communities. There is a direct relationship between educational level and voting. Individuals with associate degrees are more likely to vote than high school graduates and those with less than a high school education, and those with bachelor’s degrees vote at higher rates than those in all other categories

Institutional level cost

On the institutional level, degree non-completion reduces college’s tuition-based funding stream, an increasing important revenue source in the current climate of federal and state defunding of higher education. With the recent trends in state- and federal- level defunding of higher education, colleges and universities have had to more and more rely on tuition dollars for an increasing portion of operating budgets.

Although the loss of any student because of degree non-completion is fiscally important for colleges and universities, even greater financial concerns are associated with students from some specific subgroups who drop out. International students, who represent an increasing percentage of U.S. college student enrollments, make up one such subgroup. Because these students pay almost three times as much in tuition as native students, international students who do not complete degrees represent a major loss of revenue for colleges and universities (Lewing, 2012).

Student veterans are another fiscally important subgroup. They make up an increasing percentage of the U.S. college student population and bring with them federal educational benefits under the Post-9/11 GI Bill (Cook & Kim, 2009; Fusch, 2011). Colleges and universities have a vested financial interest in promoting veterans’ college success as Congress is paying increased attention to student veterans’ degree completion rates (Shane, 2013).

While there has been increased attention to the issue of students’ struggles with increasing college debt, this issue is particularly critical for students who take on debt but leave school without completing a degree associated with higher lifetime earnings. Students who do not complete their degrees are more likely to default on student loans. The rising amount of college student loan debt has become a pressing issue in higher education, with no easy solutions in sight.

In 2011, two thirds of graduating seniors had student loan debt with an average of $26,600 per student (“Student Debt,” 2012). Student borrowing has increased to the point that a majority of freshmen at all institutions now borrow to pay for their education (Nguyen, 2012). In a 2012 analysis of borrowing patterns of college graduates and dropouts in the period 2001–2009, the percentage of students who borrowed to finance college increased from 47% to 53% (Nguyen, 2012). Not surprisingly, borrowers who dropped out were more than four times more likely to default on their loans (Nguyen, 2012).

The U.S. higher education system is experiencing a crisis of degree non-completion, and the negative effects of this crisis extent far beyond the institutions themselves. In their search for effective approaches for addressing this issue, many college and universities are turning to mentoring, particularly peer mentoring, as a vehicle for promoting student success improving degree completion rates.

Next: What is Mentoring? What is Peer Mentoring? What are the Positive Effects of Peer Mentoring on College Student Success?

Shane, L. (2013, January 7). How many student veterans graduate? No one knows.
Stars and Stripes. Retrieved from http://www.studentclearinghouse.org/about/
media_center/articles/files/StarsAndStripes_010713

As part of an Aspen Institute-sponsored panel discussion of the Purpose of Higher education in the 21st Century, one panelist, Dr. Claude Steele, identified three general purposes for higher education: serving as a vehicle for personal development, serving as part of a system of innovation, and producing educated citizens. Steele’s statement captures a perspective on the purpose of higher education typically referred to as acquiring a liberal education, the idea that college is a vehicle for intellectual development, developing a flexible mind, and, regardless of the field of study, helping students acquire knowledge and intellectual skills that can be applied in a variety of different contexts. Dan Berrett, in a more recent Chronicle of Higher Education article, “The Day the Purpose of Higher Education Changed,” presents a competing, more utilitarian perspective about the purpose of higher ed. He discussed the historical moment in February 1967 where then California governor Ronald Regan argued that the real purpose of higher education should be instrumental , to help young people gain skills to secure jobs and their individual goals. These two perspectives exist in a kind of ying-yang relationship; as the influence of one perspective increases, the other decreases and vice versa. Over the last 40 years, it seems as if the instrumental / utilitarian perspective has been gaining ground.

For several years I’ve taught a class, The Sociology of Higher Education, at Portland State University, in Portland Oregon. This year, after my students viewed the Aspen Institute video discussion and read Berrett’s Chronicle article, I asked them to write essays on why they were attending college and trying to earn college degrees. Not surprising their essays reflected elements of both perspectives. While many talked about the importance of gaining a diverse perspective (after all they are Sociology majors) all of them also noted that they were attending college to earn degrees in order to get jobs that would be fulfilling and economically rewarding.

Again that is not surprising. Portland State is Oregon’s only urban university and the majority of PSU undergraduates transferred from primarily 2-year community colleges. The undergraduate student population is close to 50% first generation students, i.e. students for whom neither parent completed a 4 year degree at a U.S. college and university. PSU’s percentage of first-generation students is much closer to those of community colleges than the percentages of elite private schools. We also have a significant number of older, returning students including international students and student veterans. Higher education, whether starting at two- or four-year college, is seen as a vehicle for economic advancement. So it is not surprising that my students agreed that an important purpose of higher education for them was to further their occupational careers.

There are real financial benefits for completing a college degree. Adults 25 to 34 years old with college degrees, working year round, earn about two-thirds more than high school graduates and about 40% more than someone who attended college but did not complete a degree (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2015). This means that a college graduate’s lifetime earnings can be as much as half a million dollars more than those of a high school graduate.

But there is an elephant in the room that won’t go away; many students who begin college leave without ever completing their degrees. Unfortunately students are not the only ones impacted by the issue of degree non-completion.

Next: Why Should We Care Whether Students Complete Their College Degrees?

Welcome to College Student Mentoring Matters. I am launching this blog to share the insights, experiences, and resources I have gained over my 25+ years of formally and informally mentoring college students in the hope that this material will be of value to my readers. I am at an interesting crossroads in my own life. As an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Portland State University, I have traded in my tenured teaching role for a new position as a consultant offering support for colleges and universities that are trying to develop mentoring programs to facilitate their students’ higher education success and degree completion. My new book, Developing Effective Student Peer Mentoring Programs: A Practitioner’s Guide to Program Design, Delivery, Evaluation and Training, published by Stylus Press, is due out in August, 2015.

I also have developed a complimentary website that provides some background on mentoring, why mentoring can help address issues of degree completion, and my own approach for using mentoring to promote college student success. With this blog I hope to be able to share my thoughts on these and other important higher education issues, as well as connections to useable resources.

As a newbie to the blogosphere, I initially wasn’t sure exactly how to proceed. I have plenty to say (just ask my family, friends or students), but where should I start so that all the different pieces fit together and make sense? Then I got some assistance. I was having breakfast with a friend right after my website went live and his feedback was that in order to help readers understand what they would gain from following my blog, I need to answer three BIG questions.

Three Big Questions

Why is the issue of college student degree non-completion important?

This area includes topics such as what exactly is the purpose of 21st Century higher education? How does college provide students with the skills they’ll need for future occupational success in a changing world? What is the value of a college degree? Do all groups of students have equal opportunities to succeed at college? How does the percentage of young people with college degrees in the United States compare with rates from other industrialized countries? Why do so many students who begin college take longer than planned or fail to complete their degrees? What are some of the adjustment issues all students must address to succeed at college? What are additional adjustment issues faced by first-generation students, student veterans, and international students?

How is mentoring relevant for addressing higher education issues?

Specific topics in this area include what are the differences between hierarchical and peer mentoring? What are some mentoring-associated benefits for college students? How can mentoring help address adjustment issues faced by all college students? How can mentoring help address group specific adjustment issues faced by first generation and international students, and student veterans? What are best practices for design, delivery, determining program content, developing mentor training, and program evaluation form effective programs?

What are some of Pete Collier’s ideas for using mentoring to improve college student degree completion?

This area includes topics I am most looking forward to sharing with my readers including how does perceived credibility impact the relative effectiveness of different mentoring approaches? How can models of role mastery, decision-making and expertise development inform mentor program design and delivery? What are the best ways to package program content to facilitate student learning? How can mentoring help students better understand and appropriately respond to expectations associated with the culture of higher education? Why should service be an important part of mentor program content? What should be included in an effective mentor training curriculum?

These three big questions will be the main threads that connect the different posts on my blog.

My plan is to share a new post every couple of weeks. I also plan on weaving into my posts connections to other resources I have discovered as I put my practioner’s guide to program development together. I welcome your comments and will endeavor to respond in a timely manner.

Dr. Peter J. Collier, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Portland State University, brings 20 years of experience in program design, evaluation and promotion of college student retention and academic success to assist you in developing new or refining existing programs.